Monday 3 October 2011 16.43 EDT
First published on Monday 3 October 2011 16.43 EDT

Amanda Knox began her 10-minute plea to the court by tackling an issue that has bedevilled this case: "It has been often stated that I am a different person from what I seem … that it is not understood who I am." Knox's retort was that she was the same person as the one whose flatmate was murdered four years ago. That is hard to believe.

One thousand four hundred and fifty days and nights in a foreign prison would be enough to change anyone, even without the merciless media scrutiny and courtroom character assassination to which Knox has been subjected. Like Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Knox became the plaything of public opinion. Even the prosecutors who put her in prison called her "Amanda", never "Signora Knox".

Fellow inmates, in contact with Italian reporters, have spoken of a woman who has become less trusting, while developing great inner resources. But quite apart from whether she has changed over time, there is the more intriguing question of who is the true Amanda Knox. Though she and her lawyers have vehemently denied she has the split personality attributed to her by a lawyer in the appeal, she has nevertheless shown a remarkable capacity for presenting contrasting images of herself: one day shooting a glance that could look disquieting when frozen in a photograph; the next, arriving in court with a smile and dressed in a T-shirt proclaiming "All You Need is Love".

The "many faces of Amanda" was not all media hype, or overheated lawyers' rhetoric. Part of the continuing fascination of the affair will be to see which one is the true one.

Is she just an older version of the compassionate, diligent girl her parents knew back in Seattle – or the predatory and provocative young woman described by some who knew her in Perugia?

Prison may even have made her more enigmatic. "Like all the women in here, she puts a mask on in the morning that she only takes off in the evening, in her own bed, when she is alone," said Father Saulo Scarabattoli, the chaplain at Capanne prison, where she has spent the last four years.

The family's priority, said her stepfather, Chris Mellas, in a break from the appeal proceedings, would be to live together normally for a while, "so that she can get used to not being in prison, which is going to take some time".

But there are rumours of at least one television interview in the US with a major news network to tell her story. According to her family, Knox wants to publish a book about her experiences that should shed more light on her character.

"She'll write, because that's her way of dealing with things," said Mellas. To ensure that her account – on which she has not apparently begun – has maximum impact, Knox may seek to keep the number of her post-release interviews to a minimum.

In any case, as her stepfather noted, her experiences since the death of Meredith Kercher have made her pretty wary of journalists.